Bungie is rolling out a series of mid-season tweaks to Destiny 2 on October 17, and among them is an adjustment to the costs for Exotic armor focusing that should make it easier for players to enhance their character builds.
The details were released in Bungie's latest This Week in Destiny blog post, where it outlined some slight adjustments to some specific Exotic armor pieces and weapon archetypes as well. The adjustments to Exotic focusing make the entire endeavor a little bit cheaper, lowering the barrier of difficulty for players trying to get specific pieces.
Starting on October 17, Exotic armor focusing will no longer require the tough-to-come-by Exotic Cipher currency. It'll also cost less in general: Tier 1 focusing will cost 30,000 Glimmer and 10 Enhancement Prisms, while Tier 2 focusing will cost 60,000 Glimmer and two Ascendant Shards. That's down from the current prices of 30,000 Glimmer and one Ascendant Shard for Tier 1, and 60,000 Glimmer, two Ascendant Shards, and an Exotic Cipher for Tier 2.
Currently, visiting Master Rahool in the Tower when you earn an Exotic engram in the game presents you with three options. First, you can just cash in the engram as normal and receive a random piece of Exotic armor or weapon. If you're missing any of the Exotics available in the world loot pool that can be earned randomly, the engram is weighted toward giving you what you don't have. Otherwise, it'll give you a random piece of gear from what you already own.
Starting in Destiny 2's previous season, the Season of the Deep, Rahool started offering the ability to decode Exotic engrams into specific pieces of armor. The system has two tiers: You can either choose the cheaper and more random Tier 1, which allows you to focus your engram to pull from only from the specific groups of Exotics released with each expansion; or you can choose the more expensive Tier 2, which lets you pick exactly the piece of armor the engram grants you.
In its blog post, Bungie said that, after looking at the data, it wasn't happy with the speed with which players were able to get what they wanted from Exotic focusing. The system needs to be designed so that more casual players can earn the Exotics they want without a massive time investment, and players who spend more time in the game aren't earning so many Exotics that they become trivial and uninteresting. Still, the current system was making it too hard for casual players to access the higher tier of focusing in a timely manner, so the requirements needed a change.
Generally, the whole system will require fewer top-tier currencies that are hard to get. Exotic Ciphers can only be earned in two places: the weekly Xenology quest obtainable from weekend Exotics vendor Xur, or the free seasonal reward track, which gives one Cipher at level 55. Bungie said the cadence of earning Ciphers was too slow for most players, which is why it eliminated the requirement.
It also removed the requirement for an Ascendant Shard for Tier 1 focusing, replacing the cost with Enhancement Prisms. Shards are a top-tier currency that can only be earned in a few ways, like completing Nightfall Strikes, resetting vendor reputation ranks, and earning season pass levels. Replacing the cost with Prisms will take some of the burden of earning Shards off players for lower-tier focusing, while retaining the aspirational nature of higher-tier focusing.
The mid-season update will also see weapon-balancing adjustments added to Destiny 2. Read This Week in Destiny for the full details.
